An Ocean In Between
by whitelilly0989
Summary: She wondered if there were words waiting to be said that never left his lips when she'd mumbled the famous "I'll go to Paris", turned on her heels and left him there, her bruised heart always looking back. A Ryan/Taylor story


**Author's Note:**_ Facts you need to know before reading this: 1. It's kind of AU-ish, Taylor took the train to France alone, and the ending of the show changes too. 2. This is the most random thing I've ever written... so please don't judge me too harshly. _

_Questions you may have after reading this: _

_1. What on Earth inspired this? I swear I don't even know myself. It's been influenced by 'We Are broken' by Paramore (huge Paramore here), by my crazy life, and ultimately by a lot of randomness. _

_2. Will I ever get these (insert the amount of time you took to read this) back? As someone very wise told me, I can't turn back time, sorry... lol_

_And last but not least..._

_3. WHY DID YOU DO THAT? It's what flowed, please don't kill me! lol. _

_Now I leave you off to read. _

_XOXOX_

"**An Ocean In Between****"**

"_When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone"_ – Tennessee Williams

She read the letters one by one as if it it'd been the first time she'd read them, as if it'd been the first time she'd seen the combination of the black imaginary ink reflected in the screen of her computer making contrast with the whiter shade of purity that was supposed to simulate the page on the file she'd opened randomly on this night.

She wasn't sure of why she'd opened the file of quotes she'd accumulated over the years, especially when she'd even forgotten that file existed in the first place.

But as she stared at the screen and her mind repeated as a lifeless echo the words that Tennessee Williams had written so long ago, a sudden dryness possessed her throat that interestingly so, made it all the more impossible to tear her eyes from the absent cursor blinking persistently in perfect unison with her pounding heart. She did her best to try and stop thinking of the last time the life-giving organ had been looking so fiercely and determinedly for a way out of her ribcage but as the words kept getting louder and bitter in every corner of her eyes, the angst and numbness becoming one and the same, she realized it was too late.

He was already inside her head.

XOXOX

The windowpane revealed a fast white light of clarity shine as if it was noon right in the middle of the night. Aside from the steady downpour, his only companion was a deafening silence that mixed together with the tinkling sound of rainfall, resulted into a torrential and disorganized orchestra that still somehow sounded like a beautiful 80's ballad. Yellow blurred city lights made patterns across the length of his arm, the same shade of yellow and orange dully painting the space of the room giving it a touch of confusion and a distinct goofiness he found himself at first not getting used to, but that joined together with nature's serenade drowning his thoughts, he found himself adoring all the same.

He didn't know why it reminded him of her.

XOXOX

A gentle lulling breeze came in without permission, moving delicately every thin and weightless surface, but her figure remained sitting there immobile… intact, strong and even stubborn underneath its silky touch.

Nothing was like that now.

She heard someone yell something in the language of love that sounded not lovely at all, the sound of the cursing words down on the street hanging loosely on the cave of her ears. It was a frequent thing to hear a Parisian stranger shout, or even mumble something that sounded harsh and that slit her perfect image of how this place was supposed to be.

Everything sounded just like that now.

She sucked a mouthful of air and she waited for it to hit the wall of her lungs but it never did. The coldness surrounding her heart begged like an iceberg waiting to melt, waiting to find the warmness that had filled her up one too many lifetimes ago… and still, it never did.

It'd been too hard; too hard to ask him to be someone else… or maybe it'd been too scary to even try. Right or wrong, water or oil, night or day, silence or noise, Berkeley or Paris…it was basic synonyms and antonyms, a thing she knew too well to give her any comfort and it hadn't been fair. He belonged to Berkeley, she belonged to loneliness…

Everything felt like that now.

XOXOX

She was that little voice that had resided forever in his head and never bothered to pay rent. She was the indistinguishable chatty noise that was robbed from all music and somehow still carried a tune. She was the always happy beauty that screamed the oxymoron of lusty innocence… she was the yellow dim light that had brightened his soul in the glow of every raindrop.

She was the old flame he'd never learned to let go of.

He wondered what she would be thinking. If she ever wandered back to that time wishing they could erase that day from history: the day where all the 'we can'ts', 'you can'ts' and 'you deserve mores' were exchanged in their gazes, where he wondered if it was his pain or hers the one he saw reflected in her eyes, where she'd ran out of words with a final 'I'll go to Paris' and had stolen his ability to speak. Or was it his heart?

XOXOX

See, it'd been her now, who'd ended it.

A stuffy atmosphere enveloped every atom of oxygen left in the universe and before she could stop it, the whole room shook violently in front of her eyes and she was a year younger.

Her hair was a little longer than she wore it now. Bangs swayed absently blocking her field of vision but not enough to stop her from seeing the red fire of desperation on the dark blue windows of his soul. Stares fixating into one another's, feeling the unforgiving tides of change wash over them and neither of them daring to stop them; neither of them willing to try.

"_It'll be too hard"_ behind the whisper there was certainty. And she wondered how the words had left her lips if they'd felt so foreign.

"_I know"_ there was a gut wrenching pain edging his voice but it swirled inaudible to his own ears… not hers.

"_Look at the last six months"_ underneath the strangled tone that still managed to portray a firm but shaking front, it lied an unexplored fear she didn't even let him feel.

"_It was different"_ the red shade of desperation turned bright and dark all at once; all the syllables stressed and punctuated as if it was a mute scream.

"_How?"_ the gales of air on the pier intensified and suddenly the hotness of the vague indigo sky fading to black was a little too much. She saw his gaze glaze over, struggling for words and even though the distance between them could be measured between her thumb and her foreigner, she was close enough to feel him already on the other side of the world… or maybe it was her who was already too far gone.

It'd been there when she'd said it. She'd condemned them both with only four words that had broken two hearts and had changed the same amount of lives for a lapse that had no beginning and no end. It was always that way with them both. He'd be the one in silence, in ways avoiding or not daring to address the heart of the matter and her launching herself right into it. She wondered if there were words waiting to be said that never left his lips when she'd mumbled the famous _"I'll go to Paris"_ turned on her heels and left him standing there, her bruised heart _always_ looking back.

XOXOX

Sounds of cracking wood twitched beneath his feet; as the gravity did its job and pressed his weight down on the surface. Rainfall was reaching its climax as another thick sheet of liquid broke from the sky and made zigzag shapes on the cold crystal of the window. The lighting of the secluded room was still the same, vague yellow intertwined with orange as different tones of white electricity parted the blackness above him in unequal forms every now and then.

He saw half of his reflection on the window as he stared outside and watched the water pour of all sides like waterfalls. He wondered – just like always- where the rest of him had gone.

The darkness of the night hugged his face as the irony became both warming and unsettling below the skin above his chest. He was cut in half and the missing piece was right across the lifeless blue ocean filled with massive quantities of water drops like the ones he'd stared at right now, for hours on end, perhaps innocently hoping to make a bridge with the same burning liquid that had driven them so far apart.

XOXOX

Was she selfish?

It was the only possible question that wasn't chastened in her brain as she sat there roaming the words of a past long gone still dancing in front of her eyes. Being lonely had been a conscious decision on her end, so was she being selfish by forcing him to be lonely alone?

Water crowded the space between them but there was also the invisibility of uncertainty. They'd been broken up before for half a year that felt like half a lifetime and the same distance had slit the dreams that mattered for them both, but had she chosen to give it a try just for the sake of a rampant burning kiss on an unknown room of an unknown place… would it have made a difference at all?

Agnosticism ran through her veins more powerful than true love, and as much as she wanted to believe in something that couldn't be seen, those six months apart from him had left a void inside her heart that she feared would get much bigger. They could've promised to make flights but she knew they would get much far in between, she even could've believed _"it was different"_ those six months just like he'd said, but the unanswered question that had followed was bigger than any faith and she'd devoted herself to "glamorous solitude" the next day when she'd taken the train alone and had left for the City of Love without a love to hold on to.

Was she selfish? Before she could register, the answer had drawn itself out of her lips and she could've sworn it sounded like a breathless yes.

XOXOX

His brow was slightly furrowed because of the bright light shining up in front of him. A laptop was sitting now on his lap as the rain began to settle outside but kept cascading inside of him. He began browsing his entire list of archives one after the other as his left hand ran across his face.

Click after click, a new image of the past appeared in the LCD screen. Slideshows of crooked smiles and upbeat gestures flashed all around him, each picture he'd never known why he'd saved unchaining the memories and nostalgia of two teenagers he'd once known.

The last time she'd built roadblocks around their relationship he'd taken a mental note and had known how to solve the shadows that went their way. Say what you feel. Say what you want. It was simple.

'_You'._

One answer that didn't even held a complete sentence and somehow carried the very same essence of his being. But when the moment of the truth came… he let the roadblocks built once more.

'_Three letters. So simple.' _

The scent of salty water invaded his nostrils without an apparent reason. He didn't know if he was dragging out the memories of that day when she'd left him on the pier, remembering what it was to be doomed to hold it all inside, or just because he ached for her presence and wished in vain for a chance at saying what silence had surpassed.

The rain came to a stop and for a second, so did his heart.

"_EccentricQueen has just signed in"_

XOXOX

The breath caught on her throat when she recognized his username beaming dully in front of her eyes. She felt a dizzying swell of nervousness run up her spine that screamed in harsh octaves to just sign off and run away. Their lives were different. If his life was bright stars in the nighttime sky, hers were the scarce black empty spaces in between. She was away, he was at home…

'_No one is glamorously lonely…'_ a strangled voice that sounded like her conscience did it's best to come through, but instead silence just blared between them. It seemed to be the only thing they had in common; the only thing the water hadn't washed away...

XOXOX

The conversation window had a distinct contrast than the one he'd pictured once he clicked down on her name. A blinking cursor was the only thing that dared to move, and he had the slight feeling that if it had a life, if it knew it had the power of merging two distant paths that once upon a time had been the same, it wouldn't even _blink_ in the vastness of the dimly lit room.

Thousands of thoughts whispered in his ears as incoherent voices he wasn't able to distinguish, but suddenly and inexplicably, her voice came crystal clear… the muffled melodic sound that always lived inside him, that burned around the emptiness he'd helped to forge and had tried to convince him that wasn't the reason why his life was a constant rain… if only to feel the water was their only link.

He blinked twice and the next time he looked at the screen, his username was sprawled in it without his reasoning ordering his fingers to type anything.

Maybe his heart, which rested next to hers, was begging him to come home.

XOXOX

'_Hey…'_

Three letters. Three dots. Something that said so much saying nothing at all.

The letters pricked at her chest as she remembered the ways he could deliver that small word. It had always felt like he'd even pronounced the small three dots; like he was making a big effort to move his tongue and verbalize something, letting the word hang loose giving her a cue to speak and talk his ears off.

But that was then and this was now… Three hundred sixty five days since they'd last seen each other; three hundred and sixty five days that had changed her, that made her hallow… that made her scared…

…That made her heart and mind wrestle; her stubbornness winning the fight and signing out… once again, _always_ looking back.

XOXOX

'_The difference now is that you said something'_ his mind challenged and it didn't even bother to come up with an answer because the rain had started pouring all over again, the same fainting sound cutting through the suddenly abandoned city, giving him an omen that for the first time… he understood.

It had been the wrong three letter word the one he'd decided to type.

XOXOX

Her lips rounded ever so slowly, as if a faster speed would tear her apart, and gave chance for a lifeless breath to be unlocked out of her system. Lost in the air, the aching exhale unleashed the questions she'd begun to wonder since that day… and even more so now that he'd been so close yet so far away.

Why was she living like this?

Difference had been an excuse; fear an underlying catalyst, loneliness the product of it all… but what was the reason?

In between all the inner breakdowns the motive had melted into nothing, leaving just the traces of the pretexts she'd built and he hadn't torn apart.

Why was she broken?

"_You've got 1 mail by R. Atwood"_

She just wanted to be whole again.

XOXOX

He'd never been good with words. Normally he was comfortable with that aspect of his self. Words weren't said without a meaning, words never crept to hurt anyone else without a true reason… Words weren't anything else than just that… words.

But she'd changed the looking glass he used to view his life and now he found himself torn between pissed or pleased about his inability to say poetic sentences, always going back and forth.

From the past, which was her, to the present, which was the never ending rain.

XOXOX

'_Don't__ try to pretend I'm not here…!'_

This time, it had the three dots and a hit of… exhaustion? Disappointment? Anger? Frustration? No, it was just plain pain.

She stared at the screen and a surge of a feeling that seemed almost unusual rose from the ashes of the void inside her soul. His short and persistent words exclaimed nothing but longing, a longing she knew a little too well.

Her mouth went dry and for a second or two she felt how it was to have thoughts you couldn't exteriorize… to bear undesired secrets that you wanted to scream over the rooftops but you found too complicated and a little too simple to admit.

Loneliness was reliable, even if it hurt a little.

It was too hard… too hard to try and risk her heart again.

XOXOX

Her words were blurred. Uncharacteristically of her, her words were blunt and rough… direct; lacking the poetry he'd just wished he'd possessed. He wondered if it was because her heart was with him, just like his was somewhere in yonder seas.

He stared at the screen not daring to blink… the water outside becoming a distant sound that didn't match his heart.

Memories were an electric charge that flew the distance… over the oceans and even beyond.

'_I'M NOT, I can't Ryan.__'_

It read the message. First small sentence, in all caps… frustration zapping the air all the way back from France. He could picture her hazel eyes burning fire and a mistranslated nostalgia that consumed the living dreams right out of her. But amazingly, her tone only softened at the edging anguish he was just beginning to see… saying his name oh so silently even if her desperation was right on the surface.

And suddenly it hurt so much to own her heart… even after all this time.

XOXOX

Emails go unanswered after that. Not even a casual phone call can break the silence that now seemed to be their only link. Rain keeps falling… loneliness still sets camp on each other's lives… and soon… they'd been apart more years than the days they'd been together on that Newport Beach…

XOXOX

Briefcase on one hand, phone on his ear… smile on his face. It's a proud smile, the most genuine smile he's had on years… but it still doesn't match the smiles she could drag out of him. Nothing can.

He's learned by now that she's his wonderful living ghost, and he's proud, more proud than seeing his academic dreams fulfilled, of having an eternal bleeding wound product of the war of love.

He never pushed, for knowing she carried his heart was enough… and looking back at it now that six years had passed, even if the hole never went away… it was his way of having her.

They were different… that was a fact, the only excuse of a fact he'd never dared to take out of the road.

Noise breaks from all sides of the site in dull distant sounds as the memory of her becomes stronger than he can handle right now. He flips his cell phone shut, mumbling something about 'everything looking great'; the irony not going unnoticed. He likes to thinks that wherever she is, either it is still in France, or somewhere worthy of both her greatness and his heartache, that she's happy. But he looks down to his sleeve and to his free fingers, and the memory of her hand in his becomes so vivid, he knows it's impossible she doesn't feel the same white electricity. The same annoying silence…

In the distance, the queen star has begun its slow descent over the waters, meeting the horizon and surrendering to the enormous weight of the water. Everything seems to surrender to water…

He gets lost in the shades of colors invading the sky, from yellow to orange… and auburn in between. Everything's set out to remind him of her today. It comes and goes in waves, some days are better than others, usually the ones where her memory hunts him are the ones he calls the best.

It's impossible to untie the string of yellow's drifting in the water from the scent of her presence, it's impossible to separate the memories of her from the water. He stares up at the twilight as the moon rise itself from the vast blue sea, as if announcing it's gonna be a long night. The buildings turn liquid silver and he inevitably wonders if he chose the right path in the past. And secretly he knows he didn't.

It doesn't matter how he puts it, he still can't believe their story didn't go on forever because of cruel distance, when it feels this love could trump everything. It doesn't seem fair…

He feels a longing for her presence that's even stronger than the one he felt when he read the motionless 'I'm not' that was still imbedded in his retinas, so much, that when he actually sees her… he thinks he's watching an epiphany.

Despite the small distance, nothing compared to the one he'd been slave of, he found himself unwillingly holding his breath at the sight of her in jeans and a satin blouse… the yellow vague rays of sun just adding to her untouched beauty. Her hair is darker and a hell of a lot shorter than the days of old. The straight ends of it barely pass her shoulders, but still she has a matured aura about her that both exhilarates him and scares him out.

Nevertheless, the fascination she holds is evident as his stare seems to penetrate enough to make her turn around.

And when she meets his eyes he definitely knows she's changed. Being nineteen had been an age for them both when they'd been looking for a purpose, a life, a railing to hold on to. Being nineteen had been a turning point in both their lives and on days like this, it still feels like he was just turning around it. Those times never changed even if they have, because the prism through which he looked at her, remained for him unchanging…

She vanishes for a second and he's scared he's lost her once more. He starts to panic and it's only then he realizes he has just blinked… and she's still there… standing, holding his gaze as if her life depended on it.

Perhaps it always had.

She pauses before taking a small step forward and he feels all the blood running rampantly through his veins, his heart pumping erratically and she hasn't even moved. He feels as though he's watching a miracle at the moment she shows him a broken smile, and he suddenly remembers he still has her heart… he's always have.

He freezes in place and for a second she does too. The distance separating them is less than 7 feet and even though he wants to run and melt her lips under the fire of his, he holds back… letting the stagnant silence fill them up again, glances measuring the void and speaking volumes even if they can't.

She crosses her arms and draws out a slow breath… which for once he takes as a chance to re write history and say the words held in for so long… for so damn long.

Everything else fades away, and the only thing he's able to focus on is the glazy quality her eyes have now, totally contradictory to the small trace of a smile that still flashes amidst the red glow of her lips.

He wants to say so much, so much. 'I love you, I missed you, I care about you, I've thought of you, I can't live without you, I'm sorry I hurt you, you're beautiful, I need you… I want you…' all rounding up the same three letters… that sum it all up.

'It's_ you'_

It would've come out harsh, without a preamble, without having seen someone for so damn long… but when he saw her small nod, still, the same distance away from him; when he saw her shoulders relax and breathe in the sense of completion, the integrity flashing through her body like a loud 'click' of a piece just falling into place…

He knew there wasn't more to say.

And for a brief instant it felt like they were together once more… for a second it felt like there wasn't still an ocean in between.

XOXOX

_I'll take the time to remind you again of question 3. WHY DID YOU DO THAT? Again, I don't know. lol. It's just meant to be open ended and my sweet Vex (Ave) is still convincing me of writing a sequel. If you want a sequel, pest her. lol Again, please don't be harsh and if I could take back time, I would lol. SharCas. _


End file.
